2 Answers
2

@Mechanical snail:
To start tor manually in Debian (or ubuntu I guess) I would recommend using: sudo service tor start or if you are in a graphical environment like Gnome or KDE you can use gksudo service tor start and even make a shortcut for that in the applications menu. That way you are independent of any changes in the internals of the tor package, e.g. a change in the user name or so. And you can stop tor from within Vidalia as a normal user.

Sep 25 19:29:13.697 [Warning] /var/run/tor is not owned by this user (brian, 1000) but by debian-tor (114). Perhaps you are running Tor as the wrong user?

You're running it as the wrong user. The Tor package for Ubuntu (from torproject.org; see https://www.torproject.org/docs/debian.html.en) is supposed to be run as the debian-tor user (for security reasons, by separating the Tor process from your user's files and programs).

Since the control socket is owned by debian-tor rather than your user, your tor process fails to bind to it, hence the error. When Tor startup fails, Vidalia gives the "exited unexpectedly" error message.